Announcing Pegasus Frontend

AndersHP

A little bit of benchmarking:
After I moved all my art to the USB, Pegasus boots in 1 minut 27 seconds (5030 games with logo, image and video).

If I quit Pegasus and immediately start it again, same operation takes 7 seconds!!

How come there's such a big difference? Does a lot of the data get copied to the RPi RAM, so the second time it reads from this instead of USB?

"Looking for games" part takes 15 seconds, the rest is "looking for artwork".

I don't think my USB is very fast (it's a Maxwell 64GB USB 2.0), and I wanna test a 3.1, but haven't had the opportunity yet.

Pegasus is version alpha5-63.

mitu

@andershp said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

How come there's such a big difference? Does a lot of the data get copied to the RPi RAM, so the second time it reads from this instead of USB?

Most likely yes, it caches some of the filesystem info in the memory, so subsequent access for the same folder is faster. USB 3.1 won't make a big difference, since the PI is not capable of using more than USB 2 speeds.

AndersHP

@mitu Is there any way of "prepping" the system for Pegasus?
The 1,5 minute bootup is extremely slow.

When it comes to USB2 vs USB 3.1 I have seen tests that even on USB2 readers there can be a significant speedboost.

mitu

@andershp said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

@mitu Is there any way of "prepping" the system for Pegasus?
The 1,5 minute bootup is extremely slow.

I don't know, I'm just a forum user - but didn't have a chance to try Pegasus.

Darksavior

Usb speeds will always vary depending on the flash storage the stick is using, cluster size you formatted it to, and 2.0 ports of the pi. It's why I keep my scraped art on the micro sd. Newer 3.0 sticks might get better reads due to newer flash storage, but I'd look up benchmarks of specific models anyways.

fluffypillow

@AndersHP Yeah Linux has a file system cache that can improve certain operations, like checking if the file exists (which actually takes the most of time during Pegasus' startup). Still, that kind of speedup is impressive.

Actually this just gave me an idea on how to speed up the loading with some manual caching. I'll see if I can do some benchmarks later too.

PS. Documentation is still work in progress because I keep tweaking things forever. Might release some parts earlier.

halfmanhalfcake

@fluffypillow Part by part would be easier for beginners like me

fluffypillow

The Flixnet tutorial ended up 50 pages long.

Someone stop me.

halfmanhalfcake

@fluffypillow STOP :)

lilbud

@fluffypillow No

cheshirenoir

@fluffypillow release early, release often :-D

Rion

@fluffypillow Don't stop 😀

fluffypillow

Writing the docs is going fine, I think it might be done tonight or tomorrow. Then I'll do a quick review and post it, finally.

lilbud

@fluffypillow How many Harry Potter novels long are the docs?

fluffypillow

@lilbud Harry Potter is too short to be used as a measure.

Seriously though, the Flixnet docs ended up 50 pages (not counting some default-closed code blocks), and wrote an an additional ~20 pages of a theming overview, an API documentation and a selection of QML tutorials and reference links. Now writing a second theme guide, as a shorter and simpler alternative to Flixnet. The pages have pictures and animations though, so it doesn't really feel as long.

Also tweaked the existing docs.

halfmanhalfcake

Thank you for your effort, it is very appreciated.

I will try my best with it :)

AndersHP

@darksavior said in Announcing Pegasus Frontend:

It's why I keep my scraped art on the micro sd.

But if you need to do a clean install, you have to scrape all over again, won't you?
I cannot find a good way to write to the SD card (EXT4 filesystem) from either Win or Mac. That's why I scraped everything to my USB, so ROMS + art is together. A fresh install is then very simple.

But since this makes the Pi bootup sequence take around 2 minuts, I'm having second thoughts now..

Darksavior

@andershp No, I transfer them out. I use an fxp client in windows. It's a rather simple process...drag and drop.

AndersHP

@darksavior OK, this works awesome in FileZilla and a quick find/replace for the paths in gamelist.xml

I found out why I earlier had an issue with favorites games:
When adding games as favorites in ES, the path in gamelist changes to ./media/<filename> instead of having the full path. Funny..

fluffypillow

All right, the documentation is mostly done and now available on the newly launched pegasus-frontend.org! Other than the new theme guides, all previous documents have also been moved there and got some improvement.

In addition, some of new features and fixes have also been added to Pegasus:

added support for 5 new assets
- new arcade assets: in addition to marquee and bezel, you can now add images for the control pad and the left and right sides of the cabinet -- making it possible to build eg. a 3D arcade cabinet theme
- new fixed-size user interface related assets: tile (a square image) and banner* (a 16:9 image) (*: name pending)
added internal support for game summaries (short descriptions)
added internal support for multiple developers, publishers and genres
fixed developers and publishers mixed up for Steam games
added rating and genre metadata support for Steam games
experimental builds on latest macOS